Living Room Update & A Little Sense of Defeat

Living Room with Built In Bookcases (by us) and Original 1888 Mantel.

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. The weather was splendid here this weekend! Sunny and not too hot or cold. This is the best week of weather we have had in MONTHS and it is long overdue. We have been sleeping with the windows open and the fresh air feels so nice in the morning when I wake up.

We spent most of Saturday outside between soccer and playdates and I spent most of Sunday cleaning and doing some rearranging in the Living Room, which brings me to today’s title. I pride myself on meeting deadlines and going above and beyond what is required. I don’t usually miss deadlines (although I do tend to run 10 minutes late a lot of the time now that I have kids). This week I had to let a deadline go which made me sad. Jen (and her husband) from Rambling Renovators are working on a new book called Blogger Style and they were taking submissions. It was a great opportunity to showcase our house and I blew it! I mentioned it a while back, hoping that I would be motivated enough to get the house picture ready. But alas life took over, as it tends to do, and the house wasn’t up to pare. I considered throwing some pictures together anyway but I was too embarrassed to submit them. Ultimately my family matters way more than this blog or our house, but it really hard to admit defeat. I am still trying to work on making my way through the house and make it picture worthy, but I have a feeling I will be at this for a while even though I would like to add a house tour to the website sometime soon.

Our Living Room.

So here is my Living Room as it stands today. I rearranged the books and objects by color (I know already totally overdone).  This proved somewhat challenging because we had arranged the book by height previously, so I had to arrange it by color several times across the shelves. I decided in general to follow suite with all of our miniature building, furniture and miscellaneous tchotchkes and arrange them in them the same way to correspond to the books. I think it does add some needed order to the bookcases and helps make them feel at least a little bit more up to date.

Bookshelves arranged by color.

I also wanted to keep our favorite art and architecture books together and within easy access so they are separated with a couple of my favorite items.

Our favorite art books on the lower shelf and our NYC souvenirs on the upper shelf.

We also have the kids toys in the lower right corner of the shelves including their mini play kitchen, which gets daily use. The one big advantage of using lots of color is that the kids stuff, generally fits right in. Of course I don’t think Maisie’s plastic pink castle will ever look quite right but the wooden kitchen has been happily living here for years. The pirates ships are also currently sailing on the hearth.

Kids area on the built in shelves.

The mantle has also stayed relatively the same. It houses our collection of nice snow globes and a few of our favorite characters.

The mantle complete with snowglobes and Helper and Little Helper

And last is our old sofa filled with pillows. Certainly not the most glamorous thing, but very comfy to melt into at the end of the day. And and you can tell, it is hard for me to say no to a nice patterned pillow.

Our old sofa with lots of colorful patterned pillows (from Thomas Paul, Ikea & Pottery Barn).